The Husband’s Secret

  ‘Far . . . out.’

  John-Paul shuddered and fell against her.

  ‘Did you just say far out?’ said Cecilia. ‘You seventies throwback.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said John-Paul. ‘It indicated satisfaction. Speaking of which, I sense that . . .?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Cecilia. ‘It was far out, man.’ It certainly would be next time.

  John-Paul laughed, rolled off her and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her neck.

  ‘Been a while,’ observed Cecilia neutrally.

  ‘I know,’ said John-Paul. ‘Why is that? That’s why I came home early. I suddenly got horny as hell.’

  ‘I spent all of Sister Ursula’s funeral thinking about sex,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘That’s the way,’ said John-Paul sleepily.

  ‘A truck driver whistled at me the other day. I’ve still got it, just so you know.’

  ‘I don’t need a bloody truck driver to tell me my wife’s still got it. You were wearing your gym shorts I bet.’

  ‘I was.’ She paused. ‘Someone whistled at Isabel the other day in the shops.’

  ‘Little fucker,’ said John-Paul, but without much heat. ‘She looks much younger with that haircut.’

  ‘I know. Don’t tell her.’

  ‘Not stupid.’ He sounded like he was nearly asleep.

  Everything was fine. Cecilia felt her breathing start to slow. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Berlin Wall, eh?’ said John-Paul.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I was sick to death of the Titanic.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Cecilia let herself start to slide into sleep. Everything back on track. Everything as it should be. So much to do tomorrow.

  ‘What did you do with that letter?’

  Her eyes opened. She looked straight ahead in the darkness.

  ‘I put it back up in the attic. In one of the shoeboxes.’

  It was a lie. A proper black lie sliding as easily from her lips as a white lie about satisfaction with a gift or sex. The letter was in the filing cabinet in the office just down the hallway.

  ‘Did you open it?’

  There was something about the quality of his voice. He was wide awake but he was making his voice sound sleepy and disinterested. She could feel tension emanating from the length of his body like an electrical current.

  ‘No,’ she said. She made her voice sound sleepy too. ‘You asked me not to . . . so I didn’t.’

  His arms around her seemed to soften.

  ‘Thank you. Feel embarrassed.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  His breathing slowed. She let hers slow to match his.

  She’d lied because she didn’t want to lose the opportunity to read the letter, if and when she chose to read it. It was a real lie that lay between them now. Damn it. She just wanted to forget about the bloody letter.

  She was so tired. She would think about it tomorrow.

  It was impossible to know how long she’d been asleep when she woke up again, alone in bed. Cecilia squinted at the digital clock. She couldn’t see it without her glasses.

  ‘John-Paul?’ she said, pushing herself up on her elbows. There was no sound from the ensuite bathroom. Normally he slept like the dead after a long-haul flight.

  There was a sound above her head.

  She sat up, completely alert, her heart hammering with instant understanding. He was in the attic. He never went in the attic. She’d seen the tiny beads of sweat gathering above his lips when he suffered an attack of claustrophobia. He must want that letter very badly if he was prepared to go up there.

  Hadn’t he once said: ‘It would have to be a matter of life or death to get me up there’?

  Was the letter a matter of life or death?

  Cecilia didn’t hesitate. She got out of bed, walked down the dark hallway, and into the office. She switched on the desk lamp, slid open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out the red manila folder marked Wills.

  She sat down in the leather chair, swivelled it to face the desk and opened the file in the little pool of yellow light created by the desk light.

  For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick.

  To be opened only in the event of my death.

  She opened the top drawer, took out the letter opener.

  There were frantic footsteps above her head, a thud as something fell over. He sounded like a crazy man. It occurred to her that for him to be back in Australia now, he must have gone straight to the airport after she called last night.

  For Christ’s sake, John-Paul, what in the world is going on?

  With one swift, vicious movement, she sliced the envelope open. She pulled out a handwritten letter. For a moment her eyes couldn’t focus. The words danced about in front of her.

  our baby girl Isabel

  so sorry to leave you with this

  given me more happiness than I ever deserved

  She forced herself to read it properly. Left to right. Sentence by sentence.

  chapter fifteen

  Tess woke up suddenly, irretrievably alert. She looked at the clock next to her bed and groaned. It was only eleven-thirty pm. She snapped on the bedside light and lay back on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling.

  This was her old bedroom, but there wasn’t anything much left in it to remind her of her childhood. Tess had barely been out the door before her mother had transformed it into an elegant guest bedroom with a good queen-size bed, matching bedside tables and lamps. This was in complete contrast to Auntie Mary, who had reverently kept Felicity’s bedroom exactly as she’d left it. Felicity’s room was like a perfectly preserved archaeological site, with the TV Week posters still on the wall.

  The only part of Tess’s bedroom that had remained untouched was the ceiling. She let her eyes follow the rippled edge of the white cornices. She used to lie in bed staring at the ceiling on a Sunday morning, worrying about what she’d said at last night’s party, or what she hadn’t said, or what she should have said. Parties had terrified her. Parties still terrified her. It was the lack of structure, the casualness, the not knowing where to sit. If it wasn’t for Felicity she would never have gone, but Felicity was always keen to go. She’d stand with Tess in a corner, quietly delivering cutting critiques on all the guests and making Tess laugh.

  Felicity had been her saviour.

  Wasn’t that true?

  Tonight, when she and her mother had sat down for a glass of brandy and too much chocolate (‘This is how I coped when your father left,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s medicinal.’), they’d been talking about Felicity’s phone call, and Tess said, ‘The other night, you guessed that it was Will and Felicity. How did you know?’

  ‘Felicity never let you have anything just for yourself,’ said her mother.

  ‘What?’ Tess felt bemused, disbelieving. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You wanted to learn the piano. Felicity learned the piano. You played netball. Felicity played netball. You got too good at netball, so Felicity was left behind; next thing, you’ve suddenly lost interest in netball. You get a career in advertising. What a surprise! Felicity gets a career in advertising.’

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t know. You make it sound so calculated. We just liked doing the same things. Anyway, Felicity is a graphic designer! I was an advertising manager. They’re quite different.’

  But not to her mother, who pursed her lips as if she knew better, before draining the rest of her brandy. ‘Look, I’m not saying she did it deliberately. But she suffocated you! When you were born, I remember thanking God that you weren’t a twin, that you’d be able to live your life on your own terms, without all that comparing and competing. And then, somehow, you and Felicity end up just like Mary and me, like twins! Worse than twins! I wondered what sort of person you might have become if you hadn’t had her breathing down your neck all the time, what friends you might have made –’

  ‘Friends? I wouldn’t have made
any other friends! I was too shy! I was so shy I was practically disabled. I’m still sort of socially weird.’ She had stopped short of telling her mother about her self-diagnosis.

  ‘Felicity kept you shy,’ her mother had said. ‘It suited her. You weren’t really that shy.’

  Now Tess wriggled her neck against her pillow. It was too hard; she missed her own pillow at home in Melbourne. Was what her mother said true? Had she spent most of her life in a dysfunctional relationship with her cousin?

  She thought of that awful, strange hot summer when her parents’ marriage ended. It was like remembering a long illness. She’d had no inkling. Sure, her parents aggravated each other. They were so different. But they were her mum and dad. Everyone she knew had a mum and a dad who lived in the same house. Her circle of friends and family was too small and suburban and Catholic. She knew the word ‘divorce’ but it was like the word ‘earthquake’. It wasn’t something that would ever happen to her. But five minutes after her parents made their strange, stilted little announcement, her father packed his clothes into the suitcase they took on holidays, and went to stay in a musty-smelling furnished flat full of spindly, old-lady furniture, and her mother wore the same old shapeless dress for eight days in a row and walked about the house laughing, crying and muttering, ‘Good riddance, mate.’ Tess was ten. It was Felicity who got Tess through that summer, who took her to the local pool and lay side by side with her on the concrete in the burning sun (and Felicity, with her beautiful white skin, hated sunbaking) for as long as Tess wanted, who spent her own money on a Greatest Hits record just to make Tess feel better, who brought her bowls of ice cream with chocolate topping each time she sat on the couch and cried.

  It was Felicity Tess called when she lost her virginity, when she lost her first job, when she was dumped for the first time, when Will said ‘I love you’, when she and Will had their first proper fight, when he proposed, when her waters broke, when Liam took his first steps.

  They’d shared everything throughout their lives. Toys. Bikes. Their first doll’s house. (It stayed at their grandmother’s house.) Their first car. Their first apartments. Their first overseas holiday. Tess’s husband.

  She’d let Felicity share Will. Of course she had. She’d let Felicity be like a mother to Liam, and she’d let Felicity be like a wife to Will. She’d shared her whole life with her. Because Felicity was obviously too fat to find her own husband and her own life. Was that what Tess had been subconsciously thinking? Or because she thought Felicity was too fat to even need her own life?

  And then Felicity got greedy. She wanted all of Will.

  If it had been any other woman but Felicity, Tess would never had said, ‘Have your affair and give my husband back.’ It wouldn’t have been conceivable. But because it was Felicity it was . . . okay? Forgivable? Is that what she meant? She’d share a toothbrush with Felicity, so she’d also let her use her husband? But at the same time, it also made the betrayal worse. A million times worse.

  She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow. Her feelings about Felicity were irrelevant. She needed to think about Liam. (‘What about me?’ her ten-year-old self had kept thinking when her parents split up. ‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ She’d thought she was the centre of their world, and then she’d discovered she had no vote. No control.)

  There was no such thing as a good divorce for children. She’d read that somewhere, just a few weeks ago, before all this. Even when the split was perfectly amicable, even when both parents made a huge effort, the children suffered.

  Worse than twins, her mother had said. Maybe she was right.

  Tess threw back the covers and got out of bed. She needed to go somewhere; to get out of this house and away from her thoughts. Will. Felicity. Liam. Will. Felicity. Liam.

  She would get in her mother’s car and drive. She looked down at her striped pyjama pants and T-shirt. Should she get dressed? She had nothing to wear anyway. She hadn’t brought enough clothes with her. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t get out of the car. She put on a pair of flat shoes and crept out of the room and down the hallway, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The house was silent. She switched on a lamp in the dining room and left a note for her mother just in case she woke.

  She grabbed her wallet, took her mother’s car keys from the hook beside the door and crept out into the soft, sweet night air, breathing in deeply.

  She drove her mother’s Honda along the Pacific Highway with the windows open and the radio turned off. Sydney’s North Shore was quiet, deserted. A man carrying a briefcase, who must have caught the train home after working late, hurried along the footpath.

  A woman probably wouldn’t walk home alone from the station at this time of night. Tess thought about how Will had once told her that he hated walking behind a woman late at night in case she heard his footsteps and thought he was an axe murderer. ‘I always want to call out, “It’s all right! I’m not an axe murderer!”’ he’d said. ‘I’d run for my life if someone called that out to me,’ Tess had told him. ‘See, we can’t win,’ he’d said.

  Whenever something bad happened on the North Shore, the newspapers described it as ‘Sydney’s leafy North Shore’ so it would sound extra heinous.

  Tess stopped at a traffic light, glanced down and saw the red warning light on the petrol gauge.

  ‘Dammit,’ she said.

  There was a brightly lit all-night service station on the next corner. She’d stop there. She pulled in and got out. It was deserted, except for a man on a motorbike on the other side of the forecourt, readjusting his helmet after filling up.

  She opened the petrol tank and lifted the nozzle from its slot.

  ‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

  She jumped, and spun around. The man had wheeled his motorbike over, so he was on the other side of her car. He lifted his helmet. The petrol station’s bright lights were shining in her eyes, blurring her vision. She couldn’t distinguish his features, just a creepy white blob of a face.

  Her eyes went to the empty counter inside the service station. Where was the damned attendant? Tess put her arm protectively across her braless chest. She thought of an episode of Oprah she’d seen with Felicity where a policeman advised women what to do if they were ever accosted. You had to be extremely aggressive and shout something like, ‘No! Go away! I don’t want trouble! Go! Go!’ For a while she and Felicity had taken great pleasure in yelling it at Will whenever he walked into a room.

  Tess cleared her throat and clenched her fists as if she was doing one of her Body Combat classes. It would be so much easier to be aggressive if she was wearing a bra.

  ‘Tess,’ said the man. ‘It’s just me. Connor. Connor Whitby.’

  chapter sixteen

  Rachel woke from a dream that dissolved before she could catch it. All she could remember was panic. Something to do with water. Janie when she was a little girl. Or was it Jacob?

  She sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was one-thirty am. The house smelled of sickly vanilla.

  Her mouth felt dry from the alcohol she’d drunk at the Tupperware party. It seemed like years had passed since then, not hours. She got out of bed. No point trying to get back to sleep now. She would be up until the grey light of dawn crept through the house.

  Moments later she had the ironing board set up and was using her remote to switch channels on the TV. There was nothing worth watching.

  She went instead to the cupboard under the TV where she kept all her video cassettes. Her old VCR was still set up so she could watch her old collection of movies. ‘Mum, all these movies of yours are on DVD now,’ Rob kept telling her worriedly, as if it were somehow illegal to still use a VCR. She ran her finger along the spines of the video cassettes, but she wasn’t in the mood for Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn or even Cary Grant.

  She pulled cassettes out willy-nilly and came upon one with a blank spine covered in handwriting: hers, Ed’s, Janie’s and Rob’s. They’d crossed out shows as
they’d recorded over each one. The children of today would probably consider this tape an ancient relic. Didn’t they just ‘download’ shows now? She went to toss the tape aside and got distracted looking at the names of the shows they used to watch in the eighties: The Sullivans, A Country Practice, Sons and Daughters. It looked like Janie had been the last one to use it. Sons and Daughters, she’d written in her scratchy, scrawly handwriting.

  Funny. It was thanks to Sons and Daughters that she’d won the quiz tonight. She remembered Janie lying on the living-room floor, transfixed by the silly show, singing along to the maudlin theme song. How did it go? Rachel could almost hear the tune in her head.

  On impulse, she stuck the cassette into the recorder and pressed play.

  She sat back on her haunches and watched the end of a margarine ad, with that comical, dated look and sound of old TV commercials. Then Sons and Daughters began. Rachel sang along in her head, amazed to find that all the words could be retrieved from her unconscious. There was Pat the Rat, younger and more attractive than Rachel had remembered. The tortured face of the male lead appeared on the screen, frowning deeply. He was still on TV, starring in some police-rescue show. Everyone’s lives had gone on. Even the lives of the stars of Sons and Daughters. Poor Janie was the only one stuck forever in 1984.

  She went to press eject when she heard Janie’s voice say, ‘Is it on?’

  Rachel’s heart stopped. Her hand froze midair.

  Janie’s face filled the screen, peering straight at the camera with a gleeful, cheeky expression. She was wearing green eyeliner and too much mascara. There was a small pimple on the side of her nose. Rachel thought she knew her daughter’s face by heart, but she’d forgotten things she hadn’t known she’d forgotten – like the exact reality of Janie’s teeth and Janie’s nose. There was nothing particularly amazing about Janie’s teeth and Janie’s nose, except that they were Janie’s, and there they were again. Her left eyetooth turned in just slightly. Her nose was a fraction too long. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she was beautiful, even more beautiful than Rachel remembered.